It's capitalism or a
habitable planet - you can't have both

There is no meaningful response to climate change
without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do
it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support
systems within the present economic system.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on
infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a
finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising
principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will
automatically undo (with its invisible hand) every single green initiative
anybody cares to come up with.

Much discussion of energy, with never
a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism
somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates
around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive
political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank
every puny law and regulation that seeks to constrain its profitability. It
therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle
climate change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social
control will we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis.

On these pages we have been called on to admire capital's ability to take
robust action while governments dither. All hail Wal-Mart for imposing a 20%
reduction in its own carbon emissions. But the point is that supermarkets are
over. We cannot have such long supply lines between us and our food. Not any
more. The very model of the supermarket is unsustainable, what with the
packaging, food miles and destruction of British farming. Small, independent
suppliers, processors and retailers or community-owned shops selling locally
produced food provide a social glue and reduce carbon emissions. The same is
true of food co-ops such as Manchester's bulk-distribution scheme serving former
"food deserts".

All hail BP and Shell for having got beyond petroleum to become non-profit
eco-networks supplying green energy. But fail to cheer the Fortune 500
corporations that will save us all and ecologists are denounced as
anti-business. Many career environmentalists fear that an anti-capitalist
position is what's alienating the mainstream from their irresistible arguments.
But is it not more likely that people are stunned into inaction by the bizarre
discrepancy between how extreme the crisis described and how insipid the
solutions proposed? Go on a march to the House of Commons. Write a letter to
your MP. And what system does your MP hold with? Name one that isn't
pro-capitalist. Oh, all right then, smartarse. But name five.

We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak
oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to
deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy
available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil
spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert
Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through
this epoch. Not least because modern agribusiness puts hundreds of calories of
fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced.

Catch-22, of course, is that the very worst fate that could befall our
species is the discovery of huge new reserves of oil, or even the burning into
the sky of all the oil that's already known about, because the climate chaos
that would unleash would make the mere collapse of industrial society a sideshow
bagatelle. Therefore, since we've got to make the switch from oil anyway, why
not do it now?

Solutions need to come from people themselves. But once set up, local
autonomous groups need to be supported by technology transfers from state to
community level. Otherwise it's too expensive to get solar panels on your roof,
let alone set up a local energy grid. Far from utopian, this has a precedent:
back in the 1920s the London boroughs of Wandsworth and Battersea had their own
electricity-generating grid for their residents. So long as energy corporations
exist, however, they will fight tooth and nail to stop whole postal districts
seceding from the national grid. Nor will the banks and the CBI be neutral
bystanders, happy to observe the inroads participatory democracy makes in
reducing carbon emissions, or a trade union striking for carbon quotas.

There are many organisational projects we can learn from. The Just Transition
Alliance, for example, was set up by black and Latino groups in the US working
with labour unions to negotiate alliances between "frontline workers and
fenceline communities", that is to say between union members who work in
polluting industries and stand to lose their jobs if the plant is shut down, and
those who live next to the same plant and stand to lose their health if it's
not.

We have to start planning seriously not just a system of personal carbon
rationing but at what limit to set our national carbon ration. Given a fixed UK
carbon allowance, what do we spend it on? What kinds of infrastructure do we
wish to build, retool or demolish? What kinds of organisational structures will
work as climate change makes pretty much all communities more or less
"fenceline" and almost all jobs more or less "frontline"? (Most of our carbon
emissions come when we're at work).

To get from here to there we must talk about climate chaos in terms of what
needs to be done for the survival of the species rather than where the debate is
at now or what people are likely to countenance tomorrow morning.

If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of
us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have lived
in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will again be
consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this one-off historical
blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that the impossible is
possible, that people in northern industrial cities can have suntans in winter
and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the
habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it's wise to
remember that they never went away. You can either have capitalism or a
habitable planet. One or the other, not both.

· Robert Newman's History of Oil will be broadcast on More4 next month